Sinners

The default interpretation of Ryan Coogler's Sinners is that the movie is about the expropriation of black culture by whites. Even the director may agree. You have a black blues musician at the heart of the narrative (who in his adult form is played by the famous blues guitarist Buddy Guy) and a band of white vampires out to suck the blood out of him. Incidentally, the clarity of Guy's notes and beauty of his voice is one of this horror movie's particular pleasures. However, you may defer to seeing the film like a great grotesque painting say Bosch's Garden of Heavenly Delights, in which the canvas does not allow for simple or reductive interpretations. Moreover, there isn't one instant of appropriation. Sure whites marauding the house of black culture is a fact, but within the context of the movie most of the theft is an in-house or rather intra-cultural affair. So what's the movie "about?" Perhaps the clue lies in the title, "sin." Sin and redemption are recurring motifs with the lone survivor of vampires, a saintly figure who's been resurrected with baptismal water--another recurring motif.

read "The Waste Land" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and also read "Punk" by Francis Levy, Vol.1 Brooklyn